


days spent in sun, & long nights after in rain

by tamsinb



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: 12x100, Constrained Writing, F/F, Knives, POV Second Person, Touching Human Ashes, swears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29390994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamsinb/pseuds/tamsinb
Summary: If you're in a place where everything's slightly different then maybe you can be slightly different too.(12 scenes of 100 words each about Betsy and Mickey, the places they inhabit, and the words they don't say.)
Relationships: Betsy Trombone/Mickey Woods
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	days spent in sun, & long nights after in rain

**Author's Note:**

> format stolen from mads who stole it from lewis attilio, on medium as @pigeonize

* * *

**1.**

It didn’t hurt to fall. It always hurt to hit the ground.

You can’t pull yourself off the field. Dew is an ersatz lubricant and you use it to drag yourself to a dugout fence with your one good arm. You sit up and imagine what dawn looks like.

You wonder how time works wherever you are.

Turns out, it moves forward just the same. With dawn comes voices.

Later you’ll learn what an alternate is, that when your team discarded you here they’d signed you up for the role.

She’s looking for someone - not you but still you answer.

**2.**

She offers to help you up. You don’t know where your knife is so you let her.

You ask her name before she asks yours and when she answers Mickey it’s with a lilting brogue that feels like rising through sparkling water.

On the theme of asking what she won’t you ask what she’s doing here. She says looking for Betsy and when you answer that you’re them she has the decency to look like she already knew.

You meet the team and purposefully fuck up the first impression.

Making up for the one it’s already too late to ruin.

**3.**

Only one person is willing to show you around the stadium. You watch her long braids sway as your brain tunes out her tour.

She asks you a question and you don’t hear what your response is but it makes her laugh. On reflex you threaten her before you realize there’s no cruelty there but she doesn’t take it how you didn’t mean it.

You ask if she wants to hang out. She asks your place or hers.

You think of the apartment your keys somehow match and answer that your place isn’t yours, not really.

“Not yet,” she offers.

**4.**

Her house is adorned with stringlights and candles and it’s dim and it’s brighter than anywhere you’ve ever been. And it’s bookshelves and it’s plant fronds hanging over them and it reminds you of the botanical garden you went to at night once as a kid and you wonder if you’re in this world’s version of there. You figure it’s a strict improvement if so.

She asks what you’d want to drink and you nervously mumble water and she smiles and brings you a beer. You feel like the book that rests openly artfully adorning her dark wooden shelf.

“Cheers.”

**5.**

Later you’re grabbing food. Your old favorite haunt, across the street from where you remember but still tastes the same. She makes a point to order without onions and you don’t let it go, who doesn’t like onions, and she laughs at your jabs and smiles sweetly like always and.

And someone told you recently, acting like they were doing you a favor, how Mickey came to be on the Pies.

You can’t bring yourself to tell her you know, though she can probably read it in you somehow.

You wonder if all she needed was someone who didn’t know.

**6.**

Woven blanket fibers rough under your fingers. Her couch lies open but she says this is lying-down music. The mood won’t let you tell her how dumb that answer is.

The music is notes long and low. Her eyes are closed and you watch her to calm down. Can’t though, too calm in here, nothing to latch onto. You clench your fists and she notices.

She wraps an arm under you and kisses your hair. When you realize that won’t be enough you’re already bringing your lips to hers.

The blanket wraps around you both of its own accord, almost.

**7.**

Season slips into rest, and cold, and you spend more time than not intertwined in her. She reads wrapped behind you and you move your head to block her view, being a bastard if only to prove to yourself again and again that she won’t mind.

She’s the only one to notice you no longer flinch when a teammate calls to you.

It’s poetry she reads, something about joy and peace and hope that goes right over your head. But the words are less important than her voice as she reads them, steady and humming against you, only for you.

**8.**

Slight thaw and the frantic promise of games restarting. As soon as it’s warm enough you begin a whirlwind tour of Philly, noting every slight difference as if it were some new part of her.

She takes you to a sculpture museum and you try to see the figures wondrous as she does and not as distended and bland. Her hands shiver as she watches and you want to tell her you love this world because she’s in it and you buy her a hot cocoa instead.

She takes it and smiles at you like they mean the same thing.

**9.**

She notices you slip out of the team gathering after the first game. You’re pissed and relieved. She doesn’t press. Just waits.

“I forgot,” you manage, “how much they look like the other ones.”

Pause. “Me too?”

You can’t lie but you can’t tell the truth. Instead:

“Never knew what I did to make them hate me. Worried I’ll do it again and it’ll be the same.”

She nods seriously and wraps you in embrace and it feels like you’re being reassembled into a shape that fits perfectly into her arms.

“You’ll always have a place in me.”

“...Promise?”

“Promise.”

**10.**

Pies clinch the playoffs. You pitch next game, your last of the regular season. Dugout’s clear minus the couple of other pitchers who are hanging out. You lean against the wall and meet Mickey’s eye looking at you from shortstop. You roll your eyes and she giggles. One out left.

Batter steps up. Mickey refocuses. Third pitch hit straight at her, fielded artfully. Game over. You bend down to grab your things. When you look up Mickey’s gone, ball sitting in a pile of ash.

The game ends with the next batter but you’re on the field long before that.

**11.**

Something like momentum.

You’re barrelling towards where she used to be and something like momentum is emanating from your animal brain and all you can think to do is leap and you hit like a meteor kicking up moondust. You’re thrashing and you don’t know what you’re doing and your vision is all pale blue and Mickey’s ashes feel like a blanket wrapped around you.

Someone tries to pull you away and you don’t know what you want but you know what you don’t want and it’s that and you swing your knife and it hits something and draws blood.

**12.**

She’d left a note behind divvying her things and when you realize she’d been ready for this it hurts all the more. A lot to her parents. Some to you: plants and books.

Open a book at random. Happens to be poetry. Thumb through. Notes in the margins, comments more arcane than the text.

A few that say: _Betsy would love this._

You drag your finger across the words but can’t make them sound like her. You remember the poem about joy and peace and hope and wonder how you can find those when she took them all with her.


End file.
